A graceful meditation on the often unsuspected family legacies ``that somehow make up the landscape that identifies who one might be.'' Hampsten (English/University of North Dakota) was especially pleased when, after the death of her mother (Elizabeth Lockwood) in 1979, her father handed her a hatbox of letters Lockwood had written to her own parents. The letters—begun in 1928, while Lockwood was a student at Wellesley—provided a record of the woman's life after college: her early married years as the wife of a foreign-service officer; the births of her four children; and life on ``Double A,'' a ranch Hampsten's parents had bought in Arizona. Hampsten read the letters not only ``to enjoy again Mother's wit, her kindness, her pride in [her] children and the interesting life she had led, but to try to fathom better what the letters meant to her, and what part writing them had in a life of hers separate from children.'' In time, Hampsten's quest to know her mother better became a search to learn more about herself and her grandparents—a search that she examines here through a series of essays. The first lovingly describes her childhood on the ranch- -a hard, lonely life for her mother, used to the more stimulating existence of a diplomat's wife, but an idyllic one for a young girl. The final essay is a frank examination of Hampsten's often awkward relationship with her own daughter. In between, she describes, with the past always a touchstone, her grandparents, childhood, education, travels, marriage, and children—all along recognizing those strands of looks, gestures, and habits that link the generations. A vivid evocation of place as well as period distinguishes this low-key but bittersweet and affecting memoir of the ``signatures that bind us together in a family.''
Pub Date: April 23, 1993
ISBN: 0-8165-1370-8
Page Count: 188
Publisher: Univ. of Arizona
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1993
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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